Coding

Scott has been programming since 1983 when he started with Basic. Since then he’s coded commercially successful products in Rexx, Lotus Notes/Domino, Perl, C, C++, etc…

In September 2008 with his son Chris, and daughter Ashley, Scott started the FFX Corporation to bring a novelty product to market. That business ran into some technical snags so product design was halted. Chris picked up Archery in January 2009, and by April Scott had started work on a new iPhone application, and fortunately, in November of 2009, the application was launched as Archer’s Mark (AM). For those not familiar with the landscape at this time, the iPhone had been out for less than two years and the iTunes App store had some very rough edges. Getting your iPhone App in the Apple App Store at that time was no easy feat. Over the years Archer’s Mark has sold thousands of copies at $19.99 each and has always maintained at least a four-star rating with customers on iTunes.

In January 2010 Lancaster Archery Supply agreed to sponsor AM and help us promote it at their annual Lancaster Archery Classic. Then in October 2010, FFX delivered Archer’s Score, as both a stand-alone iPhone application for $9.99 and as an in-app-purchase for existing Archer’s Mark customers at $7.99. Archer’s Score has also sold thousands of copies and it too has a solid four-star rating. Finally, in April 2011 FFX launched its third application, Archer’s Excuses(AE). This was a simple 99 cent application (now free) meant to inject some humor into archery. We’ve traditionally used it for promotional purposes.

Over the summer of 2010, Scott debuted Archer’s Mark on the web, a mobile website project developed entirely by Scott. It was written in PHP, with the most significant portion being the porting of the C-Language ballistics Marks Library he wrote for Archer’s Mark. This version allowed folks without an Apple iOS platform device to compute accurate sight marks. For marketing reasons this version was taken off-line in the spring of 2011 but returned during the summer of 2015 as FFX looks to sell their family of archery products.

In the spring of 2013, Scott bought a $60 Raspberry Pi single-board 1W computer. He’s since set it up for Internet Security penetration testing, and as a home web server hosting this site. Now it hosts three websites behind a world-class Content Delivery Network (CDN) provided by CloudFlare. Here are Scott’s instructions for how he set this up.

Scott has been writing code since he purchased his TRS-80 in January 1983. First, it was Basic, then Assembly. He took IBM System 360/370 Assembly at Westchester Community College in the spring of 1983. Then in the fall of that year, he took Fortran at Rochester Institute of Technology. When we co-oped with IBM Research in the spring of 1984 he began working with Rex, both on VM and on the PC as part of PC/VM Bond (God he loved Rexx). At IBM Research he taught himself Pascal & C. Note, this was all in the 1980s, since then it’s been an alphabet soup of languages with PHP being the latest.